Jeff Flake Makes the Case for Harris in Arizona

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Up to Speed

• On Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris headlined a star-studded get-out-the-vote rally in Madison, Wisconsin, aimed squarely at thousands of college students. Among the musical acts who performed at Veterans Memorial Coliseum were singer-songwriter Remi Wolf; Aaron Dessner and Matt Berninger of the indie rock band The National; singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams; and British folk rockers Mumford & Sons. The crowd of about 13,000 (according to the Harris campaign) was filled with students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the large number of young women in particular greeted Abrams’ performance with raucous screams and applause. In her remarks, Harris spoke directly to the college-aged voters in the crowd. “Every day I see the promise of America in all the young leaders who are voting for the first time,” she said, interrupted by loud cheers. “And I love your generation, I just love you guys! Let me tell you why, let me tell you why. One of the reasons is you all are rightly impatient for change.”
• Former President Donald Trump again tried to capitalize on comments from President Joe Biden that seemed to call the Republican nominee’s supporters “garbage,” this time by donning an orange safety vest and entering a garbage truck decorated with his campaign logo in Green Bay. Trump kept the vest on at his rally there, where he insisted that “250 million Americans are not garbage.” In his speech, he also recounted entering the truck, saying he “had the adrenaline going” as he tried to climb its high stairs.
• Trump transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick on Tuesday spouted claims linking vaccines to the prevalence of autism in children—after having a two-and-a-half hour meeting with vaccine-skeptical Trump supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “What he explained was when he was born, we had three vaccines, and autism was 1 in 10,000,” he said of Kennedy on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins. “Now, a baby’s born with 76 vaccines because in 1986, they waived product liability for vaccines. And—here’s the best one—they started paying the people at the NIH, right? They pay them a piece of the money for the vaccine companies. … So what happened now? Autism is 1 in 34. Amazing.” He added that Kennedy, who has said Trump promised him control of public health agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, would not be in charge of HHS. The Trump campaign has also cast doubt on Kennedy’s claim that he will receive control of such executive agencies.
• South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Wednesday said he had contacted former U.N. Ambassador and fellow GOP primary candidate Nikki Haley about campaigning for Trump. “I’ve reached out to her a couple times trying to just encourage her involvement,” he told Dispatch Politics while campaigning for Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. “I think she represents so many good things, and I hope that she and Trump get on the same page and they’re campaigning together in the next few days.” His comments come after Haley revealed that she has not spoken to Trump since June and after the Associated Press reported that she had given the former president a list of dates she would be available to campaign—but nothing has been scheduled. A Haley spokesperson declined to comment.

GOP Mayor: ‘Kamala Harris Is a Better Republican Than Donald Trump’ 

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona—Like a platoon of soldiers plotting to counterattack after seeing their home turf occupied by an invading force, roughly two dozen Republicans posted up outside an early-voting site here Wednesday to urge support for Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day.

The group, led by headliner and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, current and former suburban Phoenix mayors, and a local businessman, sought to appeal to Republicans on their terms. Donald Trump, they argued, is a populist, not a conservative. On key principles traditional Republicans care about, Harris offers more than their party’s nominee. At the very least, defeating the former president would provide space for traditional, Ronald Reagan conservatives to regain some ground in the GOP coalition.

“Some people will ask, how can a conservative Republican support a Democrat. I am supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz not in spite of being a conservative Republican, but because I am a conservative Republican,” Flake said during a news conference, referring as well to the vice president’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. 

“Conservative Republicans believe first and foremost in the rule of law and the major tenet—primary tenet—of the rule of law is respect for elections,” Flake added. “I’m supporting Kamala Harris because I know she would never use the powers of the presidency to overturn an election that she did not win. That is what Republicans believe.”

Flake was joined by Mesa Mayor John Giles, former Scottsdale Mayor Sam Campana, businessman Tim Riester, and other GOP activists who joined them for an afternoon press conference as part of the Harris campaign’s bid to win over disaffected Republicans and others on the right who are uneasy about a second Trump term. They gathered in Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb of approximately 240,000 people that features 28,000 more registered Republicans (76,401) than Democrats (48,491), according to Democratic strategists here.

That disparity showed, with some early voters who walked past heckling the group. “RINO!” shouted one man, repeatedly. “Bullsh–t” said a second man a few times, feigning a cough to mask the slight. “Get a job, dumbass,” offered a third man. “They’re not Republicans—if they don’t vote Republican they’re not Republicans,” added an elderly woman who was wearing a red, “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and encouraging voters to support the GOP ticket on behalf of a local Republican women’s club.

Republican outreach is a major component of the Harris campaign’s strategy. There is a developed network of national and local surrogates campaigning in nearly every battleground state—plus tailored advertising, door-to-door canvassing, and other political activities—targeting the millions of voters who supported former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley over Trump in this year’s GOP primaries. Unknown is its effectiveness. 

In Arizona, Trump leads Harris in polling averages, 49.5 percent to 47 percent—among his biggest advantages of any of the seven swing states. For the vice president to overcome this deficit in the final days of the contest, she is most likely going to need to pull a significant percentage of GOP crossover voters. But the Arizona Republicans involved in this effort insist many others share their views but are choosing to remain silent—except, of course, for when they vote.

“It’s going to make a significant difference—we’re going to get 10 or 11 percent of Republicans,” predicted Wes Gullett, who has been involved in Arizona politics since 1986, mainly as part of the late Republican Sen. John McCain’s in-state operation. “There’s a lot of people that are like, keep up the good work. But I can’t come out publicly.”

Flake, meanwhile, just finished a stint as U.S. ambassador to Turkey, a gig the 61-year-old was appointed to by President Joe Biden. For most of his 12 years in the House of Representatives and six years in the Senate, Flake was a conservative’s conservative—pushing GOP leadership in Congress for balanced budgets, less spending, and smaller, less regulatory government. But after clashing with Trump early in the former president’s term, Flake retired rather than seek reelection in 2018. The majority of grassroots Republicans in Arizona were (and are) Trump loyalists, and Flake would surely have lost his bid for renomination. 

But Dispatch Politics wanted to know: What would Flake tell a committed conservative of the sort he was all those years ago—and still claims to be—to convince that voter to support Harris over Trump? For many regular Republican voters, supporting a Democrat for president is difficult, even if they have concerns about Trump based on his term in office, handling of his loss to Biden in 2020, and his typically provocative behavior and rhetoric.

Flake said he would emphasize Harris’ promise to maintain strong American leadership abroad, seek bipartisanship with Republicans in Congress, and negotiate consensus legislation to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet it was Mesa Mayor John Giles who jumped in with a sharper sales pitch. “If I were talking to the Jeff Flake of 12 years ago, what I would say is: ‘Jeff, Kamala Harris is a better Republican than Donald Trump. I’m dead serious,” he said, adding that the former president is an unprincipled “populist” with no “political north star,” not a conservative.

“Obviously Trump has a lot of loyalists that aren’t going anywhere. But there’s a lot of people that have left the Republican Party. We have chosen to stay and to object and to try to reclaim the party,” Giles added. “We have to get through this election. … After that we have to have a serious, looking-in-the-mirror and deciding what we are as a party.”

Moreno Focuses on Immigration, Entitlements in Tight Race With Brown

HANOVERTON, Ohio—Bernie Moreno did not mention Donald Trump much during his campaign stop in northeastern Ohio Wednesday. But Moreno, the Republican nominee for Senate, seemed to channel Trump as he described what would happen if he defeats Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown next week. 

“I get to go to Washington, D.C. I get to leave on a nice little plane, right? American Airlines? Land in DCA, get an Uber, drive to the Capitol, open the door to Chuck Schumer’s office and say, ‘You’re fired,’” he said as the crowd of about 100 outside the Spread Eagle Tavern and Inn cheered. 

The GOP Senate candidate didn’t just impersonate the former president. Moreno also highlighted several policies from the former president’s playbook, from immigration to preserving entitlements. In a state that Trump successfully transformed from a regular battleground to a reliable Republican bulwark, that may be all that’s needed to unseat Brown, the resilient three-term incumbent.

This is a race that could determine control of the Senate, and Republicans have an increasingly good chance of picking it up. As Ohio’s white working-class voters have gravitated away from Democrats in the Trump era, Brown has been on the defensive. Although he led Moreno in polling by 4 or more points during the summer, the race has tightened, and the two have exchanged leads in polls this month. With Trump likely to carry Ohio by about 8 points, Brown is fighting for his life and hoping that enough voters will split their ticket and choose him over Moreno.

Speaking to supporters at the tavern, where Abraham Lincoln is said to have visited in 1864, Moreno highlighted a number of his populist positions. First, he hit Brown on immigration, a traditional Republican priority that the former president has made a centerpiece of his platform for his entire political career.

“Here’s a guy who went to Yale, full-paid student, and yet he pretends he’s for the working man,” Moreno said of Brown. “How can you be for the working-class American and allow 10-12 million illegals to come into this country? That’s raised the price of insurance, rent, housing—generationally high inflation?”

At the same time, he hit Brown for the Inflation Reduction Act, specifically for provisions that dealt with Medicare—not a typical Republican priority.

“This had nothing to do with reducing inflation. They took $300 billion out of Medicare to fund electric vehicle subsidies,” Moreno said. “Think about that for a second. We’re going to see the cost of Medicare premiums skyrocket for prescription drugs so that millionaires can lease electric vehicles.”

Moreno’s remarks were markedly different from those of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican in a more traditionally conservative mold who also spoke at the event. Scott likewise touched on economics and border security, but he also warned of changes Democrats would make to the Senate should they retain their majority, such as eliminating the filibuster and adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as new states. And unlike Moreno, Scott mentioned Ronald Reagan, tying the 40th president to Trump.

“It was a Ronald Reagan revolution that brought me to the conservative party,” Scott told the crowd. “It is the Donald Trump revolution that has allowed me to see the greatest hopes of poor people across this country become a reality.”

In the rest of his remarks, Moreno kept up his Trump-like persona, arraying himself against elite institutions. He appeared to reference Vinod Khosla, a Harris-supporting venture capitalist, in speaking of an “out-of-touch San Francisco billionaire” who “said that garbage is an understatement” to describe Trump supporters. He also predicted what attendees would see on TV on election night in the event of a Trump victory.

“There’s a prize waiting for you, for all of us, if you turn on CNN at 10 o’clock Eastern,” he said. “You know what that is? You get to watch grown men cry.”

But for all the Trump aping, Moreno had a rather un-Trumpy moment while speaking to reporters after the event, as he encouraged even those who would vote against him to turn out.

“This race is tight, by the way. It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be, but it’s a tight race,” he said. “It’s going to come down to the margins. It’s going to come down to turnout. And so, if you’re watching this broadcast, please go vote. Please go vote. Listen—one way or the other. Even people who don’t want to vote for me or President Trump, get your voice out there and be heard. This is the one thing that makes America unique, is that a billionaire or somebody down on their luck—it’s the same number of votes. Make your vote count.”

Eyes on the Trail

• Vice President Kamala Harris this afternoon headlines a “When We Vote, We Win” rally in Phoenix. The Democratic nominee then travels to Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, for campaign rallies. In Las Vegas, Harris will be joined by actress and singer Jennifer Lopez.
• Former President Donald Trump this afternoon hosts a campaign rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Later in the afternoon, he hosts a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Also today, Trump delivers remarks in Glendale, Arizona, at a Tucker Carlson Live Tour event.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz today travels to Pennsylvania, where in the morning he campaigns for Harris in suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County, and in the afternoon he stumps for the Democratic nominee in Erie.
• Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio campaigns for Trump in High Point, North Carolina, as the special guest of a “Gen Z” town hall hosted by Turning Point PAC and Turning Point Action, groups overseen by Charlie Kirk.
• Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz campaigns for Harris in Georgia, with stops in Cobb County, Macon, Albany, and Valdosta.
• Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida campaigns this evening for Trump in Atlanta.
• Wealthy businessman Mark Cuban campaigns for Harris in Atlanta, holding a town hall on the vice president’s economic agenda.
• Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer campaigns for Harris in her home state, with stops in Sterling Heights, Warren, Troy, and Brownstown.

Notable and Quotable

“Look, unlike Donald Trump. I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

—Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, October 30, 2024